DESCRIPTION (Taken from application abstract): The past three decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of medical imaging modalities in patient care. Ironically, however, the field of medical imaging is threatened by its own success in that the sheer mass of information available is becoming unmanageable. The long-term objective of this application is to develop the next generation of medical image information systems. This five-year FIRST award project will focus on the design and implementation of a prototype neuroimaging database management system (NI-DBMS) for managing and indexing multimodality brain images, including MRI, PET, MR spectroscopy, and MEG. This new image DBMS intends to support flexible search and browsing of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) image library, as well as clinical applications in epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. The hypothesis of this research is that different kinds of three-dimensional (3D) brain images and associated clinical data can be modeled, correlated, queried, and analyzed by computers on the World Wide Web (WWW) to aid neurologic education, practice, and research. The specific aims to investigate this hypothesis are: (I) design a new framework for multimodality neuroimage management; (ii) develop tools for extracting structural, functional, and temporal features of different brain images; (iii) investigate new content based search algorithms for epilepsy and multiple sclerosis imaging; (iv) develop a neuroimaging data model to allow access from the Web; and (v) evaluate system performance with well-defined experiments in epilepsy and multiple sclerosis imaging. The neuroimaging DBMS will be built on top of the large image archives in hospitals and will add values to the existing PACS with content-based information management and Web accessibility. The software product developed in this research will be generalizable and extensible so that it can be put into wide use by other medical centers and hospitals. Its open systems architecture will ensure image databases developed by the medical community will be sharable through the ubiquitous Web.